Opening and Closing by Nomon Tim Burnett

I had the pleasure of visiting the student Meditation Club at our local university up the hill here last Friday. They weren’t in their usual room so attendance was low they told me at about 30 college students. Sometimes they have 50 or 60, one time 70, gathered every week for meditation practice.

I’m not sure if everything they do there would ring quite the same as the way we practice here – they do a variety of guided meditations and have visiting teachers from all traditions, but some form of meditative inquiry or at least deep relaxation is the common thread and one of the organizers told me it just keeps growing.

We know anecdotally that all kinds of suffering, stress, and depression on campus are way up, and I’m sure there’s some research we could find to confirm this. A few weeks earlier there was a suicide up there and last year I remember another one. Suicide on college campus is becoming normal.

I don’t know the causes of the increase in stress among young people but it’s probably safe to assume that the increased uncertainty in everything to do with the world is a part of it. The economy is so uncertain – 4 years of college doesn’t get you a decent job – the uncertainty of the changing climate – the uncertainty of our future as a species is more and more obvious. And these students are not taught anything about facing these huge levels of uncertainty I don’t think. So maybe they’re looking for that in the Meditation Club. Something to help with the uncertainty all around them as they try to focus on the narrow requirements of academic discipline.

We human beings have an incredible ability to adapt to all of this, or at least normalize all of this, but perhaps it takes its toll on us. Perhaps there’s a kind of tightening from chronic stress. And that toll-taking is itself normalized and accepted and we go on. We go on.

Anyway one of the students asked me what the difference is between Zen Buddhism and Theravadin Buddhism and I didn’t have a very good answer. Both are Buddhism certainly if we can use that term, both are concerned with clear understanding of suffering and liberation from suffering. The feeling in the room of deep practice is the same. I said a bit on the sort of cliché lines of Theravada emphasizing individual liberation and Mahayana emphasizing compassion but you know that’s a pretty limited view really since these great traditions are all filled with people of all kinds of tendencies and views. I had to resort to “well they wear orange robes and we wear black robes” to free myself!

And so I went to Dogen for some advice. And Dogen quickly reminded me that our way is the way of questions and phrases without answers and explanations. The way of inquiry. Spacious inquiry. That our way is the pointing to something beyond our narrow view of a person in a place with a problem. That the bedrock of Buddha’s teaching on suffering, the causes of suffering, and the way to liberation from suffering is implied but it’s not presented as something to work with directly. Rather as something to make room for, vast room for, so that it can unfold naturally. And in Dogen Zen of course the most spacious activity of all is zazen. And Dogen’s zazen extends much more broadly than sitting on a cushion.

Here is one of Dogen’s favorite Zen stories. He includes it in the two collections of koans we know about, gave talks on it, and writes about it in Shobogenzo, his master work of essays on practice.

The Chan Master Nanyue Huairang visited the Sixth Ancestor, Huineng.

Huineng asked him, “Where do you come from?”

Nanyue said, “I come from the National Teacher An on Mt. Song.”

Huineng said, “What is it that thus comes?”

The Master was without means [to answer].

After studying with Huineng for eight years, he finally understood the previous conversation.

Thereupon, he announced to the Ancestor, “I’ve understood what you put to me when I first came: ‘What is it that thus comes’”

Huineng asked, “How do you understand it?”

Nanyue replied, “To say it’s like anything wouldn’t hit it.”

Huineng said, “Then is it contingent on practice and realization?”

Nanyue answered, “It’s not without practice and realization, but it’s not defiled by them.”

Huineng said, “Just this ‘not defiled’ is what the buddhas bear in mind. You’re also like this, I’m also like this, and all the ancestors of the Western Heavens [i. e., India] are also like this.”

These stories are of course mythic and compressed. It seems unlikely the one would on one’s first ever encounter with a teacher receive just the right question for practice like this. A question that catches your attention in deep way within a container of practice such that you settle right into studying the Way through that question. But it’s written that way so why not enjoy this wonderful mythic quality of Zen where the teacher always says the perfect thing at the perfect time to the student.

Well let me diverge into a side note there. This mythic quality misunderstood has some obvious terrible and harmful aspects, too, it if taken literally. We’ve had several long-standing Zen scandals break in the American Zen world in the last months. Teachers who I’m sure were elevated in some way by their sanghas to where the usual common-sense bounds of ethical behavior and our commitment to the precepts got all muddled up. The teachers suffer a lot from this elevation and the students of course suffer even more. There’s at least one suicide mixed into one of these scandals. And these scandals bring daylight to previous scandals that enabled them. The good news is less is hidden, but anyway, if Huineng or Nanyue does something inappropriate in the dokusan room don’t assume it’s a brilliant teaching, okay?

But that aside there is an unbelievably deep power to myth. We are wired up as mythic animals. Our big brains which can process so much sensory data and construct such elaborate constructs about who we are and what the world is have a deep need for a bigger picture than those constructions. And that bigger picture forms itself into myth often in ways we don’t really understand.

And this monk is with us in mythic time and space as he enters the teachers room in Huineng’s monastery in southern China at about 700 A.D. Huineng sees a settled practitioner in front of him and asks a standard Zen checking question: “Where do you come from?” A question that works in the conventional world and the mythic world simultaneously. Ask yourself that question, too.

Where do you come from? Is it the full story to say you come from Bellingham or Vancouver or Seattle? What is the full feeling of that question? Where do you really come from?

In our story this first question wasn’t the question the young Nanyue stayed with, it was perhaps a stepping stone into the deep question that activated his practice with Huineng for the next 15 years. He said, “I come from the National Teacher An on Mt. Song.”

In the conventional sense this is explaining a bit about his Zen credentials. I was with an authorized Chan teacher in a major monastery. And in the early stages of Zen in the 8th century this also probably told Huineng something about Nanyue’s training as Huineng would have known something about this teacher An on Mt. Song and how he teaches students. And yes it’s all “he’s” here – it’s clear that Dogen appreciated women as practitioners but he wouldn’t have had access to many stories about them sadly.

And so Huineng probes more deeply, “What is it that thus comes?” or I’ve seen this translated as “What is it that has come like this?” too. And I took a stab at translating the Chinese myself coming up with something like “Just this matter just comes” with a few characters in there I couldn’t make sense of. All of this comes to us from a very different type of language than the Romance languages. Who knows if we have the sense of it right. Or maybe however we interpret it is right in some way.

But we can refine this down to a really basic and important question for us right here practicing in this sesshin: “What is it?”

We think we know so much. We think we know who we are. After we practice a bit we think we know how sesshin is supposed to go. We know how Zen should go and how it should be adapted and improved in the West. We have so many opinions. We are convinced that we are right about everything and at the same time we’re convinced that we are total idiots and don’t know anything. It’s a whirlwind in there isn’t it?

But what if we drop all of that and instead of holding up our self and our view we were to treasure just a question. Just a sense of asking, of inquiry. Another Chinese Zen poem says, “The matter is not in the words, yet it responds to the inquiring impulse.”

There’s a powerful contraction from suffering that we habituate too. Our Zen ancestors suggest that working with a question can pry us open.

You know I was at a training a few weeks ago in the Jon Kabat-Zinn style of teaching mindfulness – a kind of secular adaptation of Buddha Dharma. With two of their teachers who were are both really great: Melissa Blacker and Florence Melleo-Meyer. It’s a very powerful actually and unique style of teaching and practice. Anyway since they ban themselves from mentioning Dharma teachers they use poems to have teachings to work with. And they love Rumi most of all. Here’s a poem from Rumi about this closing and the possibility of opening.

Birdwings

Your grief for what you’ve lost lifts a mirror
up to where you are bravely working.

Expecting the worst, you look, and instead,
here’s the joyful face you’ve been wanting to see.

Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes.

If it were always a fist or always stretched open,
you would be paralyzed.

Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding,
the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated

as birdwings.

So it’s not that only opening is The Way. To be always stretched open would be a kind of stuckness – a kind of paralysis. Being stuck closed is so much more common that we don’t think about being stuck open, and we think that open is the goal. Rumi suggesting that there’s a healthy movement that can and should be allowed. What we are opening to opening and closing.

Sometimes we need to close up to protect ourselves, sometimes this human organism needs safety. The draw bridge must come up and the portcullis come down. We may at times need to withdraw. The English word “retreat” is used for the activity we’re doing this very weekend. In some ways we’re hiding from the world this weekend. We’ve retreated. And that’s okay.

That retreat and withdraw is included in the full range of human experience. Opening and closing. Like a bird’s wings.

This opening and closing has a sense of tenderness and vulnerability to it doesn’t it? We might get hurt doing this opening and closing. There’s some risk here. Edie in her way seeking mind talk spoke a lot about taking risks.

Someone sent me a reference to the work of a psychologist named Brene’ Brown who does research into vulnerability, courage, authenticity and shame. Her research suggests that as a society we’re becoming less and less tolerant of vulnerability. We don’t feel safe enough to be vulnerable and as a result we’re more and more missing out on our life. Jon Kabat-Zinn with his Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction says we’re on autopilot and not even aware in some ways that our life is even happening.

Brene’ Brown says that we have come to see vulnerability as a kind of weakness, but really vulnerability is the birthplace of joy, love, belonging, creativity, and faith.

A marker of this loss of tolerance for vulnerability she talks about is that joy itself becomes foreboding. Something good happens and we see this as a sign that something bad is just around the corner. Do you ever feel that way?

That we are compelled in our inner dialog to catastrophize in order to sort of beat vulnerability to the punch in some way.

That we take on disappointment and complaint as a lifestyle in order to avoid ever really feeling real disappointment.

And that we use perfectionism as a shield, trying to look perfect as something to hide behind – as opposed to healthy striving which includes vulnerable traits like compromise and learning from mistakes.

One of the most telling thing she said in this lecture was that research shows that numbing the dark emotions reduces tolerance for all emotion including joy. One study showed that a strongly joyful experience is just as likely as a strongly negative experience to trigger relapse in people with addiction. That it’s not that there are dark emotions that can be diminished or held at bay in some way and then you pour in happy emotions and everything is balanced again. Her research seems to agree with Rumi 100%. That what is lost is this ability to open and close. That the whole apparatus gets stuck and once it’s stuck a jolt from either positive or negative emotions is deeply unsettling.

Spirituality and intimate relationships are inherently vulnerable, she says.

And so here we are in the room with Huineng and this new student Nanyue. Huineng challenges Nanyue to look deeply into this moment, “What is it that thus comes?” “What is this arising?” And Nanyue is not defensive, he doesn’t make something up to cover, he doesn’t bluster, he is able to rest in his own vulnerability and realize that this teacher is pointing to some deeper sense of this life that he’s not clear on.

And so Nanyue stays to live and practice at Huineng’s monastery. For eight years practicing with this question, “What is it that thus comes?” This sounds pretty impressive to us like he sat down on a zafu and did an eight year meditation on this question but of course that’s not how it would have been. His days included zazen certainly but also work, hanging out with the other monks, walks in the mountains around the monastery, meetings with the teacher. He got upset sometimes, he got short with his neighbor in the zendo, he felt embarrassed by this and apologized remembering to open back into vulnerability. And eight years isn’t really all that long is it? Many people in this room have practiced diligently for eight years and longer.

I think what we can assume here is a strong steadiness of intention. This question I opened the talk with, why are you here, I think Nanyue stayed pretty clear on that point. He had a sense of why he was there and he kept on through thick and thin until one day it dawned on him that there was some clarity around this central question. Whether he had some dramatic experience or just a show glimmer of realization we don’t know. In Everyday Zen I think most of us are slow glimmer people but either way is fine.

So in his next dokusan he brought up that conversation from eight years ago.

Thereupon, he announced to the Ancestor, “I’ve understood what you put to me when I first came: ‘What is it that thus comes’”

And who knows if Huineng even remembered asking him that. My teachers don’t always remember in the usual way of remembering the important things I told them years ago and it’s okay if they don’t.

Huineng asked, “How do you understand it?”

Nanyue replied, “To say it’s like anything wouldn’t hit it.”

Huineng said, “Then is it contingent on practice and realization?”

The Master answered, “It’s not without practice and realization, but it’s not defiled by them.”

The Ancestor said, “Just this ‘not defiled’ is what the buddhas bear in mind. You’re also like this, I’m also like this, and all the ancestors of the Western Heavens [i. e., India] are also like this.”

This is an important point. As we study this opening and closing of the wings we might think there is something we do, I do, called practice that leads to something we get called realization. Defiled here means a sort of confused mixing or pollution in that way. This line in the case is also translated “It’s not that there is no practice and no realization, it is just that they cannot be divided.” So in realization there’s practice, in practice there’s realization. Our way of dividing things up, good and bad, this and that separates us from reality. Separates us from “that which thus comes”. Even this lovely teaching from Rumi on the opening and closing of the birds wings is limited to a certain domain of understanding. Nanyue could also have said, “It’s not that there is no opening and closing it’s just that they are not different.”

Returning to Brene’ Brown she believes that what drives our increasing intolerance for vulnerability is a sense of scarcity. A culture of psychological scarcity. That we are never good enough, safe enough, perfect enough, and most importantly that we are never extraordinary enough. And this last point affects us in Zen. These wonderful teachers of past, present and future seem so extraordinary to us. We’ll never be as deeply realized as they are.

But consider this story again. We know it was so important to Dogen, the founder of our school. These two guys as shown in this dialog aren’t super-human. There are no super powers here. No great flashes of brilliance. Just a patient investigation of the way things are. And the enlightenment describes is just the holding in awareness of this point of non-separation.

You could say that Zen is a deep investigation into the extraordinariness of the ordinary. Of just this mind, just this moment. Just this.

Zen and this psychology seem to agree on the answer to this tightness, this feeling of inadequacy this yearning and failure to be special. Both suggest the power of the practice of gratitude and honoring the ordinary. And doing this together. Gratitude for the ordinary joys of being alive: gratitude for connection, community, nature. And remembering to play!

In other news, astronomers using the new Kepler space telescope have recently discovered 1200 possible planets, twice as many as they knew about previously and they expect to find more as it goes along. It finds them by monitoring the brightness of stars. There’s a bit of a flicker I guess from the mass of orbiting planets. Who knows what’s out there. Are we the only planet with this odd phenomena of living beings and consciousness? Who knows. It’s a big universe. It’s a deep mind. What is it that thus comes?

About Nomon Tim Burnett

Nomon Tim Burnett is a an ordained Soto priest with the Everyday Zen Foundation (established by his teacher, Zoketsu Norman Fischer). Having completed Shuso training in 2003 he currently serves as Resident Priest of the Red Cedar Zen Community and received dharma transmission from Zoketsu in 2011.

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One comment

In the classroom most of my students were Christian. When we discussed ethics and morality, inevitably the idea of god would arise and, soon after, certainty and dogma. God is not an answer, I learned to say, but a question; a question is an open mind, an answer a closed mind. This often had a salutary effect on our discussion. But the way is really more like question, answer, question, answer, question….
Robert

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